[MUD-Dev2] Fallen Earth

[Tess Snider]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Sean Howard <squidi at squidi.net> wrote:
> MMOs used to be a varied and exciting genre, filled to the brim with risky
> opportunity and educationally fascinating discourse. WoW killed that, more
> or less.

I hate to be so dismissive, but really, that assertion is completely
out-of-touch with the reality of the situation.

The number of innovative MMO projects out there hasn't decreased at
all.  What has decreased is their visibility.  When there were fewer
MMOs out there to talk about, every little announcement was a big
deal.  There was even much ado about completely idiotic things that
really didn't deserve the attention, like a naive teenager who claimed
to be making an MMO where you could launch babies with catapults.  We
had a few slow news years.

These days, you can't even keep track of all the stuff going on,
anymore.  Did you know there were basketball MMOs?  Have you tried out
the ship combat in Pirates of the Burning Sea?  Have you looked to see
what kinds of things people were building in Metaplace?

To the extent that discourse has been "killed," I don't think it has
anything to do with WoW.  I'd say that it has more to do with those of
us who were having the discourse, in the first place.  Many of us are
quite busy actually *making* things. But, moreover, the whole scene
used to be smaller.  We could pull people under the tent for a chat,
back in the day, but there's no way you could fit everyone under the
tent, today.  These days, between the growing population of MMO
developers and the secrecy of the companies involved, there just isn't
as much of a core community, anymore.

It's important to also understand that because WoW was an evolutionary
(rather than revolutionary) product, it benefited from many of the
same lessons that people on this list learned, over the years.  So,
they made many design decisions that, in some cases, were already
advocated by people around here, before there even was a WoW.  Are
design lessons supposed to be like indie bands that you lose interest
in when they become too popular?  Are we all supposed to go advocate
permadeath now, because resurrection is the dominant paradigm?

> So I see any features that are overly similar to WoW as a
> stagnation of the genre.

My Prius has the same number of wheels as the wildly successful Model
T.  It has headlights, contains an internal combustion engine, and was
even made on an assembly line.  Does this represent a stagnation in
automotive design?

> Sure, WoW didn't invent leveling, but leveling
> used to be different for every game. Now it's not. It's all WoW leveling,
> all the time. Which games DON'T have little flashy icons over the heads of
> quest givers these days?

If you want to complain about stagnation, how about picking on
MUD-style scrolling combat logs?  Quest Giver icons are positively new
and exciting, by comparison. :-P

You can debate whether marking quest givers is a good idea or a bad
idea (that might be a fun debate), but on the balance, Blizzard was
building-to-the-usage-patterns of typical mass-market players.  If
people are trampling a footpath in the green lawn in front of your
shop, you can A.) fruitlessly throw grass seed on the path, B.) build
a wall, or C.) build a sidewalk.  Blizzard chose to build a sidewalk,
because it looks better than bare dirt, and it makes it easier for the
pedestrians to do business with them.  If the guy in the next shop
over doesn't build a sidewalk, the pedestrians may be less inclined to
drop by his shop, next.

Tess